Opening: Augie Picado opens with examples of countries that restrict the economic and political freedoms of its citizens. Those countries are Cuba and North Korea, self-determined isolationist, communist countries. Picado warns that countries should not follow the example of Cuba and North Korea by enacting protectionist policies.
Main Points: Picado explains that individuals fear globalization because they view it as unfair. They believe that it’s the fault of globalization that many negative events, such as unemployment and stagnant standard of living, are occurring in their lives. He states a statistic that puts those false claims into perspective: 87% of manufacturing jobs are lost due to improvements in productivity. Consequently, only 13% of manufacturing jobs are lost due to outsourcing. He makes a point that massive increases on the cost of products is not worth the recapturing of only one out of ten jobs.
The Closing: The speaker closes with a very rational summary of the reason why shared production makes sense–because it allows for countries and companies to specialize and thus work together to create cheaper products.
My Opinion: While I mostly agree with Picado’s position, I don’t think that the way that he has phrased his talk is the most effective way of doing so. Notably, while only one in ten jobs may be gained by bringing manufacturing plants back home, to that one person, it’s 100% of his job; it’s his life back on track. Somehow the fact that he claims that one person’s livelihood is not worth a 30% increase in prices doesn’t sound very productive. Also, the way that be bluntly states that that one job will also be lost due to future productivity so it is useless to try to protect it and bring it back now is likely too rational for the typical listener, and especially for someone who has been impacted by the decrease in manufacturing jobs. Instead of saying that we shouldn’t be focusing on bringing back manufacturing jobs, I think that it would have been more powerful to focus on how various programs are going to help those displaced workers without increasing the cost of products and how we will be able to stay ahead of this problem in the future.